


What's Missing?

by SylvanWitch



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Angst, Breaking Up & Making Up, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, M/M, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-08 01:17:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21467659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: Five times they say, "I miss you," until they finally get it right.
Relationships: Rachel Edwards/Danny "Danno" Williams, Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 12
Kudos: 130
Collections: Spicy Advent - Multi-fandom Porn Advent Calendar 2019





	What's Missing?

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt that launched this tale of angst and eventual hurt/comfort was, simply, "I miss you."

“I miss you.”

“…”

“You there, Danny?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“Nothing to say?”

“I think it’s all been said, Steve.”

Steve didn’t throw the phone when Danny ended the connection on a too civil, “Good night,” but it was a close thing.

He tapped it twice against the arm of his chair and then dropped it onto the seat of the empty one beside him—the one Danny always sat in.

The ankle-slappers were limned in silver from a half-moon hanging fat and low in the sky. It would be a good night for a swim if Steve weren’t on his fifth Longboard.

He scrubbed his bare feet against the sandy grass of his yard and closed his eyes against the brightness of the sky. 

Usually, the waves lulled him, their rhythm soothing. Tonight, they seemed overloud, insistent, like the cold, sick feeling beneath his diaphragm, the one telling him he’d screwed up and Danny wasn’t coming back.

He told himself he shouldn’t care. Danny was with Rachel, and they seemed happy. That was all that mattered, right? Danny and Rachel and Grace and Charlie. They were a family unit. They belonged together.

Who was Steve to get in the way of that?

Except this time a week ago, Steve was draped across Danny’s sweaty back, so far inside of him that he swore he could feel Danny’s pulse through his own cock, Danny panting, breaking Steve’s name on every thrust, both of them groaning on release, seconds apart, both of them laughing giddily afterward, touching at shoulders and wrists and ankles.

Both of them happy, Steve had thought. 

“Not happy enough,” he murmured, a low, hoarse noise. His eyes felt lined with sand, his guts full of broken glass, and he knew he should get up and drag himself inside, drink a couple of glasses of water and then sleep it off.

But the last time they were together was in Steve’s bed, and though he’d changed the sheets and there was a new hole in the wall beside the door, where Steve had put his fist through it after their fight—well, sometimes he thought he could smell Danny, smell them there, the sweat and heat and sex.

He was too old to sleep in a beach chair, but that was what Steve decided to do. It was cool out there, and he’d be cold before morning, but the waves that moments ago had been accusing him of failure were somehow muted now by the yawn cracking his jaw and the memory of Danny’s body beneath his, of Danny’s voice saying Steve’s name like it was the only word he could remember, the only one that mattered.

With the moon for company, Steve slid down a little in his chair to rest the back of his head against the cool, hard wood and tried to go to sleep, hoping he’d dream of Danny and hoping he wouldn’t.

*****

“I miss you.”

Who the hell did Steve think he was to say that to Danny? Like it was Danny’s fault Steve was alone, feeling sorry for himself in Hawaii while Danny spent time with Rachel and the kids on Maui.

_Family time_, he’d called it when he’d gone over to Steve’s to explain.

Danny should’ve expected the explosion, but he hadn’t; somehow, he’d thought Steve would understand that he needed this, needed one last chance to see if things could maybe work out. 

“And I’m what, just supposed to wait for you, Danny, is that it? Wait until you figure out what you really want?” Steve had sounded angry, yeah, but also hurt—real hurt, the kind he’d suffered enough of to last a lifetime.

Danny hadn’t meant to hurt Steve. He’d only meant…hell, he didn’t know what he’d meant, only that Steve had taken it all wrong.

“Danny, are you coming?”

Rachel’s voice was thin through the mostly closed sliding door, carried away by the wind on the balcony where Danny was sitting with his bare feet up on the rail, chair tipped back. 

It was chilly out there, another thing Danny hadn’t expected. 

He was beginning to wonder if he understands how anything works.

“Be in in a minute, Rach,” he said, though he didn’t really want to go in. He’d like to sit out there for another hour, until the cold on his skin had joined the cold in his bones and frozen him solid. Then he wouldn’t have to deal with the fallout of all his bad decisions.

He shouldn’t have slept with Steve, no matter how good or right it had felt.

He shouldn’t have made it seem like there was more between them than…whatever it was they had been doing lately, the on-again, off-again flirtation, the occasional hand job, the spectacular make-out session in his car that led to marks he had trouble explaining away the next day.

The night of intense, obliterative sex that had turned him, temporarily, into a complete fool.

And yeah, too, Danny probably shouldn’t have agreed to this last-chance trip with Rachel, either, especially not with the kids. 

As if three days on a different island traipsing from water park to beach to restaurant to cultural exhibit was going to somehow cure him and Rachel of the problems that had broken them up twice already.

As if two nights in Rachel’s arms would erase the feel of Steve’s big hand on the back of his neck, pulling him in for an overwhelming kiss, or make him forget the words Steve whispered, hoarse and needy, against his sweaty neck as he came.

“Coming?” Rachel asked, much closer this time, standing just inside the door.

Danny looked at her upside down before letting the chair drop, putting his feet on the slip-proof surface of the balcony, and standing up, his back cracking and knee protesting.

“Alright, where to now?” he asked her, hearing the false note in his voice even before her face showed that she’d heard it.

“Charlie would like to go on the submarine ride,” Rachel said, a certain wariness in her voice, as if she expected Danny to blow up over it.

“Okay, sure. Submarine it is.”

He was being conciliatory, he knew that. He was giving Charlie what he wanted, a fun afternoon in an underwater fantasy world where parents didn’t break-up and get back together on an endless, confusing loop. He was giving himself time, too—Rachel wouldn’t ask him any difficult questions while they were trapped with strangers beneath the surface of the waves.

Danny pasted on a smile he didn’t feel and tried not to think about how Steve had sounded last night on the phone, how lonely and sad he’d been.

Tried not to accept the sinking realization that he had caused Steve to sound like that, that he was to blame for wanting things to be uncomplicated, to somehow magically work out, like that had ever happened in his life.

So, yeah, maybe he was the asshole in this scenario, but there was nothing he could do about it now.

Feeling like he was already drowning, Danny put his hand on Rachel’s back and ushered Charlie and Grace out the door ahead of them, already dreading the elevator for the way it would exacerbate the sensation of falling—

falling out of love

falling in love

falling apart.

*****

“I…”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Steve, what?”

“Shouldn’t you be with Rachel right now? I mean, it’s your last night. You should be getting all romantic, right, full court press, no holds barred—”

“Stop talking in sports terms. It’s not a competition.”

Only after the fact did Danny realize how Steve might take that—it’s not a competition because Steve couldn’t win. Or it wasn’t a competition because Steve’s heart wasn’t a goal to be won. Or… 

“Right.” 

Danny winced at the deadness in Steve’s voice, the flat, neutral affect that said Steve was hiding something like a son-of-a-bitch.

“What were you going to say, Steve? Tell me.” Danny tried to infuse his voice with all the feelings he couldn’t seem to get past his windpipe and out of his mouth.

“No, it’s fine, Danny. I should say goodnight. Goodnight.”

“Steve, I…miss you.”

It took Danny a cold-stomached second to realize that Steve had hung up. He stared at his phone, wanting to call his partner back, to tell him he had it wrong.

But Steve wasn’t wrong.

Yeah, maybe he was kind of a jerk for hanging up before Danny could work up the courage to say something sappy and probably monumentally stupid, all things considered.

But about the romance thing, Steve was dead-on. 

Rachel expected something special on their last night. She hadn’t said anything, but she’d given him the big, liquid doe eyes she reserved for those occasions when he’d learned to go an extra mile for her because she was feeling fat (when pregnant with Grace), or fragile (when her mother was being more difficult than usual), or angry (more and more during the last year of their marriage).

And Danny had tried. He’d reached down into the last of his reserves and tried to wrap his mind around what to give her or do for her or say to her that would make her see what she really meant to him.

The problem was, Danny didn’t know what that was anymore, and every idea he had had seemed wrong.

Flowers were trite, a serenade too cheesy. He’d done the fancy dinner thing once too often, and anyway, it meant more coming from his own hands, not some condescending waiter in a penguin suit.

Maybe Rachel just wanted Danny to show her he loved her. And it wasn’t that Danny didn’t love her.

It’s just that he didn’t think he loved only her.

Or maybe that he loved her in a different way than he used to, before Steve had ploughed through his life like a monster truck taking out spectators at a stadium rally.

The destructive image felt justified, though a part of Danny knew that he was being unfair. Ultimately, Steve hadn’t tried to stop him coming to Maui. He’d argued against it, asked Danny what he wanted, tried to get Danny to see that this thing they had wasn’t just letting off steam or getting off on each other.

Steve had stood in his bedroom, the room where they’d made love—Danny grimaced at the term, but he was man enough to call it like he saw it—and asked Danny to stay, to work things out.

And Danny had walked away from him, left him standing in that room alone to run off with his sort-of-not-really-maybe-ex-wife.

So Danny didn’t think he had any right to miss Steve like this, like there was something vital missing from his innards, like he might never be whole again if he didn’t make things right with Steve.

Fuck, what had Danny been thinking coming to Maui with Rachel? And the kids, the poor kids—Danny was the worst father in the history of fatherhood.

“Danny?”

Rachel’s voice was small, the way she got when Danny’s anger grew incendiary, and she wanted to handle him with care. He’d never directed that anger at her, not even when she’d left him the first time or lied to him the second time, about Charlie.

Oh, he’d been angry at her, but Danny Williams reserved the white-hot, quiet-deadly anger for pedophiles and rapists and vicious murderers and the drug dealers who sold death to eighth graders.

Now, Rachel was talking to him like he might explode, and he found it irritating that she didn’t know him better—a reaction that was a gut-punch all on its own.

“What’s up, Rach?” he asked, covering her hesitant hand with his when she rested it on his shoulder.

He was out on the balcony again, bare feet against the cold metal railing, tipped back on the chair again.

“It’s chilly out here,” she said, rubbing his arm as if to warm him. “You should come inside.”

There was nothing come-hither in her tone, and when Danny chanced a look at her face, painted in light and shadow from the glowing windows of a neighboring hotel, he saw that she was pale and drawn, a tightness around her eyes and mouth that spoke of things she’d go to the grave before saying.

“Okay,” he agreed, heart wrung by that look and a squirmy guilt telling him he’d put it there.

He was failing everyone he loved, and he didn’t know how to stop it.

“It’s okay, you know,” she said when she’d slid the glass door closed behind him and led him to the suite they’d been sharing. The kids were long abed, hopefully asleep and dreaming balmy ocean dreams.

“What’s that?” he asked, stalling. He had a swimming sensation, like he was moving through deep water, the quiet of the room, the darkness, the intimacy—all of it dragging at his limbs. 

“It’s okay that this isn’t working between us. You can say it, Danny. You know I can always tell.” She looked younger than he’d ever seen her and at the same time older than he was, infinitely older, like she’d gleaned the wisdom of the ages from the shower she’d just taken. Her hair was still damp, slightly frizzy, and she was wearing no makeup. The white hotel robe she was holding closed at her throat made her look pale, almost ethereal.

“I love you,” Danny began, but it sounded desperate, half like he was trying to convince himself more than her and half like he was following some script he’d memorized a long time ago.

“But…”

She let the word hang, one tired eyebrow raised, a stillness in her face that presaged the coming storm of recrimination and tears he was expecting—that he’d earned.

“I love Steve, too.”

It felt all kinds of wrong that he was confessing it to Rachel before he’d ever said it to Steve, but there was unfinished business here, and Danny was going to see it through to the end before he took the next leap of foolish faith.

Whatever she’d been expecting, it clearly wasn’t that.

“What?” she said, a dry, strangled sound, and then, louder, “What?”

The third time, the word was broken by a hysterical giggle, and then she was crying and hiccupping in laughter and making a mess of his shirt when he reached out and she came easily into his arms.

When she finally fell still, he took a step back, so he could see her face. She still looked tired—and now red-eyed and blotchy, as well—but something had eased from her features, like she’d cried out the last of her hope and was resigned now, at peace if not happier for Danny’s confession.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and she shook her head and stepped out of his embrace, brushing her eyelashes clear of lingering tears with the ball of her thumb.

“No, Danny, it’s okay. I’m the one who should be sorry. I keep doing this to you, and it’s not fair. I knew it wasn’t going to work. I haven’t really changed, have I? And without that, what’s the use of trying? Isn’t that the literal definition of insanity?”

“You’re not insane, Rach, just—”

“Fucked up,” she said succinctly.

Danny couldn’t dispute it. For one thing, it would be a lie, and for another, he thought maybe they both were, and it was time they admitted it out loud.

“Yeah, me too.”

There was a silence then of some minutes, during which he listened to her breathing and tried to imagine what life would be in the next twenty-four hours, never mind the next week, month, or year.

Rachel broke the silence, startling him as much with the sound as with the sentiment: “You should go to him.”

Danny had already looked up earlier flights back to Oahu, but he didn’t want to tell her that. It seemed too much like rubbing it in. 

“Yeah?” he asked, sounding hopeful and scared and young.

Rachel put her palm against his cheek, the briefest of touches, like a blessing, and then turned and walked into the bedroom and closed the door between them. His bag was already sitting on the floor beside the closed door, a mute reminder that Rachel had been aware of Danny’s state of mind even before he’d come to terms with it.

She still knew him better than anyone.

_Almost_ anyone.

Hope and terror fighting a war for his heartrate, Danny picked up his bag, slipped on his shoes, thumbed open the airline tickets tab, and made the purchase before the elevator doors were closed.

He could be home in less than two hours.

Danny speed-dialed Steve, heart in his throat as he waited for him to pick up.

“Danny?”

Steve sounded like he’d been sleeping; the hoarseness sent an electric zing down Danny’s spine, and he took a breath before speaking.

“Hey. I’m coming home.”

There was a speaking silence, long enough that Danny though maybe Steve had hung up.

Then, “Flight 372?”

Danny’s heart kicked against his ribs, hope starting to wrestle its way out of fear.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll see you at the airport.”

*****

“I missed you.”

“You’re the one who did the leaving, Danny.”

“I know.”

The hug at the airport had been awkward—stiff, one-armed, as if each was unsure of what he had a right to ask for.

The car ride to Danny’s favorite overlook—neutral territory, Steve had called it—had moved beyond awkward into the stuff of school anxiety nightmares.

Danny felt naked, unprepared, about to be tested on something that would determine his whole future.

Neither of them spoke as they pulled into the deserted lot, Steve parking in the dimmest corner of it and getting out without looking at Danny.

Danny watched him walk over to the wall and swing his legs over it to sit with his feet dangling out over the rocks a hundred feet below.

Danny had always loved and hated the place—loved it for its beauty and for the significance it had in his personal history on the island; hated it for the vertiginous drop, the sense of impending disaster just a false step away.

If there were a better symbol for what was about to happen in his life, Danny couldn’t think of it.

Danny joined his partner but kept his back to the sea, his feet on the broken asphalt at the edge of the lot.

Steve seemed to take that as an indicator. Danny caught an aborted nod, like Steve was affirming something with himself, and he said, “Let’s get this over with, Danny. It’s late and I’m tired.”

If Steve had sounded curt or angry or like he was trying to remain professional, Danny might have reacted differently.

But he didn’t sound like any of those things or like anything or anyone Danny had met before. Even in the earliest days of their acquaintance, Steve’s voice had always held a kind of warmth—in the beginning a sort of amused condescension, and then later, as they grew to be friends, a genuine affection.

Finally, as lovers, an almost desperate heat, like Steve couldn’t quite hide what Danny did and meant to him.

Now, Steve sounded like a stranger, like someone reading the weather report on the radio.

Something cold enough to blister gripped his heart.

“No,” he choked out. “Steve…” Breathless, panicked at the tight line of Steve’s shoulders, at the thousand-yard stare fixed on a horizon lost in the heaving darkness of the Pacific, Danny put a hand out, almost flailing, and touched Steve’s where it rest on the top of the wall.

“Don’t,” Steve warned, and there was anger there, the killing kind, that sure, cold voice Steve used when he was already exerting pressure on the trigger. But there was something else there, too, the thing Steve was hiding beneath the threat display—despair, gaping and dark like the space beneath his dangling boots.

“I love you, Steve,” Danny said. 

Steve shook his head, a sharp, absolute denial.

“I love you, and I told Rachel I loved you, and I thought the plane couldn’t go any faster to get me back to you, and I can’t and won’t let you go, Steve. I won’t _let_ you. I know I’m the one who walked away. I know I was too scared to face you—this—us.

But I’m here now, and I’m telling you I love you, and I’m asking you—no, I’m begging you, Steve. Please don’t give up on us.

We can make this work. I know we can. I’m sorry, babe. I’m so sorry. I was an asshole for hurting you and ten kinds of idiot for leaving. Please, Steve. Please.”

Steve wouldn’t look at him. He was staring out toward the silver-threaded black waves like he could read in their pattern some answer to what he was feeling. Danny felt helpless and terrified, as if he were dangling out over the precipice with only his hand on Steve’s keeping him from falling.

Danny couldn’t take a full breath; his heart was choking him, thundering in his throat so strongly that he could feel the vein fluttering against the skin.

When he couldn’t stand Steve’s silence another second, Danny said, “Steve,” a shredded whisper, barely audible over the susurrus of the waves far below.

Steve’s hand twitched beneath Danny’s touch, and Danny let go, tried to speak, couldn’t manage it, throat closing, heart thrashing against his chest, cold sweat breaking out across his shoulders.

Then Steve’s hand was back, turned palm-up, fingers curling through Danny’s, closing over his hand, grounding him.

It wasn’t a sob, the breath that punched out of him. He’d swear to his dying day that he wasn’t crying. But when Steve finally turned to look him in the eye from a foot away, he might have caught a reflection of the silver waves below tracking down Danny’s face.

Steve leaned toward him, breath hot on Danny’s cold mouth, and pressed a kiss, firm but undemanding, against his lips.

Danny froze for a surging heartbeat, stunned almost blind by the intensity of his feelings, and then opened his mouth on a half-laugh, half-sigh and let Steve warm him up.

*****

“I missed you,” Steve breathed into Danny’s ear, and smiled when he felt Danny shiver.

“I can tell,” Danny answered. “My ass is never going to be the same.”

Steve smirked against the sweat-damp hair at Danny’s temple. Danny was lying with his back to Steve, the little spoon to Steve’s big. One of Steve’s legs was threaded through Danny’s, and Steve had one arm around his waist and the other slung over their heads, along the top of the pillow they shared. 

“Stop smirking,” Danny murmured, and Steve couldn’t help but laugh. Danny’s hair tickled Steve’s lips, and sweat was gathering wherever Steve’s skin touched Danny’s. Steve’s chest hair was pressed against Danny’s damp back, making him itchy.

He never wanted to move again.

“I love you,” Danny said, and Steve couldn’t stop the reflexive stillness that overtook him, turning him to stone. He wanted to believe Danny, wanted to feel in those words the same heat and desire and, yeah, love that he’d felt when he was buried inside him, wringing his name from Danny’s lips.

But he wasn’t sure he could trust Danny’s words now.

Danny squirmed around until he was facing Steve, who still had an arm draped over Danny’s waist but had otherwise managed to put some distance between them. He couldn’t look at Danny, couldn’t face what he’d see in his partner’s face.

That Danny had waited to say those words until they were post-coital, blissed out and exhausted—and until Danny had been facing away from him—those signals seemed to tell Steve all he needed to know.

He wasn’t going to be second-best. He didn’t think his heart could take it.

Danny waited, uncharacteristically quiet, until Steve looked at him. Steve tried to maintain a neutral expression, the one he adopted when he was about to get a reaming from his CO. 

When Danny saw that he had Steve’s attention, he said, “I love you,” again, slowly and clearly, gaze not wavering.

Steve took in every line of Danny’s face—the laughter lines around his eyes, the worry lines at the corners of his mouth. He saw in Danny’s blue eyes a warmth of love, an abiding fondness, the kind of trust Steve had known with a rare few, and he felt his heart flip in his chest.

He had to catch his breath before he could say, “I know. I love you, too.”

The kiss that followed was unlike any they’d shared before—it had a newness, as if they’d crossed some invisible line, a point of no return beyond which there was only the unknown, promising excitement and terror by turns.

Danny made a noise in his throat and surged against Steve, holding him as though one or both were in danger of drowning.

“I missed you,” Danny whispered, kissing the corner of Steve’s mouth and then the hollow of his throat and then the spot on his chest directly above his heart.

“I missed you,” Danny said again and again, leaving searing markers like pins on the map of Steve’s body, tracing a path toward a secret place only the two of them could go and then only together.

“I’m never leaving you again,” Danny promised at last before taking Steve, still flaccid, into his mouth, as if he would keep this most precious, fragile part of him safe there while Steve tried to catch his breath.

Steve breathed, “Danny,” and “God,” and variations on that blasphemous theme and threaded his fingers through Danny’s hair, petting, not pulling, not ready yet to rise to the occasion but trusting his partner, his friend, his lover and brother, to keep him safe and whole and to bring him where they both needed him to be—together and forever.


End file.
